Janice Mason Steeves

Baer Art Center Residency that I did in 2016 and 2017. I'm always interested in remote places and what draws people there. What words do they use to describe the journey and what sort of work comes out of this experience? I asked two artists if they would respond to these questions: Amy Clay and Laura Moriarty. AMY CLAY: I followed  Amy Clay's adventures a few years ago as she travelled around the world from one artist residency to another for an entire year. Amy Clay walking in the gorgeous greens of Ireland " My life and art is all about the Epic Quest and mysterious journeys to places of the imagination. Pushing beyond the familiar to new territory - facing the fear of the unknown, and seeing what’s on the other side. This relates to my love of wild and remote places. I’m especially drawn to Northern landscapes - as I know you are too! One of my favorite places is a residency on the far southwestern corner of Ireland called Cill Rialaig. It’...

Recently I was interviewed by Amy Guion Clay for her blog post on Artist/Travellers. Amy is an inveterate traveller and has gone to 17 artist residencies in the past number of years. When I first found her blog in 2011,  I was heading off to an artist residency in Can Serrat, Spain. Amy had just been there and was on her way to residencies around the world in a year she devoted to travel. Currently she's been to 17 artist residencies and has recently released an online video program  teaching all about artist residencies. She interviewed me because of my long-standing interest in art and travel. You can read the interview here. Cill Rialaig artist residency, Ireland. Out on Bolus Head with the Skellig Islands in the distance One's destination is never a place, but always a new way of seeing things.  Henry Miller

From Cill Rialaig  12x112" acrylic on canvas © 2012 Janice Mason Steeves There are always threads aren't there, that connect one thing and another in our lives.  I wrote last week about the threads that connected many events in my life that week.  This week I found some new connections. In preparing a slide presentation for Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts near Victoria, BC, where I'll be teaching next week, I've been looking at images of the paintings I did at my artist residency at Cill Rialaig in Ireland last fall.  I haven't looked at the work for a while and in fact tended to dismiss it as only experimental work.  I've put it on a shelf in my studio and haven't looked at it since I came home last December.  My artist talk is about Journeys: a short version of how I came to be doing the work I'm doing now-where it came from, what influenced it, and what I learn from it. Sometimes we don't know the strength of a pai...

Silence 30 50x50"  oil/cold wax on panel © 2013 Janice Mason Steeves When I return from a journey,  I let the experience wash through me, not knowing what effect it will have on my work. I just begin to work, and after I have a few paintings under my belt,  I stand back to see what's happening.  Then I realize that it could be a colour I saw that influenced me or the lines on the standing stones, or even something someone said to me. I always find that I am slow to really settle into a trip, especially when it requires that I paint.  For me, painting is about place; my relationship with the place I am in.  In his new book: The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot , Robert MacFarlane says that "the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?  And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?" I painted in the beautif...

Silence Red 6 24x24" oil/cold wax on panel ©2012 Janice Mason Steeves This is the time of the year that we should take stock isn't it?  Look back and see what we've done this year.  What we've accomplished.  Are the art sales up?  Or down?  What are we doing right?  Or wrong? More than this, I try to look back and see if my work has changed and grown.  And if I have.  I look back to see what I've learned and if it was what I thought I was going to learn. I always try to write New Year's Resolutions.  Some years I create detailed sections like they tell you in the books on Success:  Physical, Emotional, Spiritual, Artistic, Financial.  I divide them down into bite-sized pieces that would be almost impossible not to accomplish. It takes a lot of time and thought.  I carefully file this list in my pink filing cabinet.  By the end of January, I can't remember which section I've filed it under and in...

East Aquhorthies Stone Circle This part of my journey has taken me on to Aberdeenshire in Scotland where I've been staying with cousins for the week.  The first day was glorious with clear skies and bright sun and we made hay...visiting 3 stone circles and 2 other archeological sites, and also the graveyard where my grandparents are buried.  It's wonderful how I feel connected to this place through those grandparents and my cousins. View from the window at Coreenview Farm Midmark Kirk Stone Circle with crosses from the cemetery casting shadows on the recumbent stone. The stone circles here are quite different from those in Ireland.  The circles I've seen here in North East Scotland have a recumbent stone at the head of the circle, flanked by 2 standing stones.  These circles are oriented to the rising or the setting of the full moon. I began to ask my cousins for stories of my grandparents that they had heard from their grandpar...

Endings and beginnings.  As I pack up, I also wrap up in my mind what I take away from this place.  One of the biggest lessons I've learned is about the gift of letting the day unfold as it will,. My friend Rebecca Crowell  wrote a wonderful post about learning to follow her intuition.  Of course this is always the case in painting abstraction where you have to trust that what you do will eventually resolve itself into a painting. But this journey to Cill Rialaig has helped with that lesson.  In some cases, I've been forced to stay in the moment as in driving a car with a stick shift on the wrong side of the road on steep single-track roads with no guard rails, around corners where you can't see what's coming.  I am totally in the moment then! It's been important to give in to the beauty of the day and to the rhythm of life here.  Some days have been grey, overcast and windy  where the studio skylight is pelted with rain and sm...

The adventure of being in Ireland continues.  I begin to get into a routine of life and then it changes.  I had a wonderful visit from my friend Mary Meighan , who leads Celtic journeys in Ireland.  We walked up to the ancient monastic site just up the road from Cill Rialaig.  After spending some time in the site, Mary offered a Celtic Blessings to us for our work, blessings upon the ancestors of the land  that they might guide us and blessings to the people at home who helped us be here.  Mary and I also visited other ancient sites that day.  Part of the journey was to talk to people about where the sites are.  We searched for the holy well of a female saint and asked for help from construction workers, from the women who work in the Cill Rialaig Arts Centre and from a woman in a white hairnet who works at the Skellig Chocolate factory.  Everyone is more than eager to help if they can.  The woman in the chocolate factory k...

Each day, I catch my breath again and again with the beauty in this part of Ireland-the light, the changing sky. Rebecca and I are driving and hiking in this incredible part of Ireland.  Our travels have taken us to the vast Inny Beach in the nearby town of Waterville, where we walked the length of the beach and  created an Andy Goldsworthy stone sculpture using the lines on beach stones.   We drove to Valentia Island over a mountain on a single-track road edged with high grass-covered stone walls.  Some kind of terror in that effort!  But the views from the top were out of this world and the island was like a fairy land, with enormous ferns and palm trees here and there. And almost everywhere we've gone, we've seen brilliant rainbows shooting out of low-hanging clouds.  Breathtaking. On the way home from Valentia Island,  we stopped at the beach at Finian's Bay.  It was ab...

We arrived in the blinding sun, driving our small rental car up the single-track road. Rebecca yelled when we got near the top of the road because neither of us could see ahead as we crested the hill.  The edge of the cliff was on her side of the car!  My artist friend, Rebecca Crowell and I are doing an artist residency here at Cill Rialaig in the small cliff-top stone cottages about 3km outside the little village of Ballinskelligs.  Part of the pilgrimage here I'm sure is the difficulty finding the place.  There are no signs and people give directions as though you've lived in the area all your life.  "Go to the right past the Abbey,  then turn left at the intersection and left again just before the Skelling Ring road". After several wrong turns and chats with local farmers, we finally found the one track road narrowed in with bushes and grasses, giving us an exciting 3km drive up to Cill Rialaig. While we were lost and d...

I'm heading off in two more days, to Ireland for my artist residency at Cill Rialaig. The Cill Rialaig Project, which opened in 1993, was founded by Noelle Campbell Sharp as a place where artists, writers and musicians can spend a period of dedicated time developing their own work. There are seven cottages, each with studio space, that were restored from the ruins of a deserted pre-famine village, circa 1796.  Situated on Bolas Head, a remote peninsula in County Kerry , the cottages sit on top of a cliff face overlooking Ballinskelligs Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.  I'm going to meet up in Killarney with my dear friend Rebecca Crowell , an artist from the U.S.  We'll rent a car to get to this remote residency.  It's a 3 mile hike into the nearest town of Ballinskelligs so it will be convenient to have a car, and especially wonderful to have two of us to share the driving in case one is frightened of driving a stick shift on the left side of t...